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The GOP Needs a Conservative in 2016

By KEITH KOFFLER

January 07, 2014

But the crisis, to paraphrase the calculation of one of Obama’s minions, will go completely to waste if Republicans fail to nominate someone who will use it to sow the seeds of an American cultural, economic and political renaissance. Abolishing Obamacare is a far too modest goal. Republicans will have a once-in-a-generation chance to lead the public in dismantling large portions of the welfare state.

Only a true conservative who understands and loves the theories undergirding limited government will have the energy, knowledge and courage to do it. Only a true conservative can frame the failures of Obamacare, the burden of debt and the listless economy as not just individual policy failures but as a systemic crisis precipitated by heavy doses of statism administered since at least the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt. And only a true conservative can present Republican ideas as not just a practical alternative but as an inspiring philosophy that will heal the country and create opportunity for everyone. By making disciples of the unconverted, a conservative Republican nominee in 2016 can synthesize an enthusiastic new majority, sweeping into office with a massive mandate to remove America once and for all from the road to the hopeless, destitute socialist wasteland it’s been on under Obama.

The Washington establishment will beg to differ: Won’t it take a moderate to capture the center and beat Hillary Clinton? To that I say: How’d that work out last time? Or the time before? To win back the White House, Republicans must trash all their polling data, all their focus groups and all their petty fears about what particular factions of the voters will think of them and what calumnies Democrats will hurl their way. Because they must abandon thoughts of appeasing the electorate. Rather than coddle and please, they must explain and seek to influence.

If Republicans make the mistake yet again of putting forth someone who advertises competence and problem-solving abilities, if they respond to the demands of the Washington cognoscenti for a “reasonable” moderate, they may or may not win the election. But they will have failed to seize the opportunity to realign the electorate, roll back the failed liberal project, install conservative policies and save the country from its path of fatal decay.

Obama thought he had captured one of those transformational moments in time, but the country had not really lurched to the left. Instead, he rammed through, with a bare, partisan majority, unpopular legislation that addressed a problem relatively low on Americans’ list of priorities.

Obama was right about the prospect of a “fundamental” transformation of the United States of America. But its time is 2016, not 2008. And it will take a true conservative to do it.

Keith Koffler, who covered the White House as a reporter for CongressDaily and Roll Call, is editor of the website White House Dossier.